Samsung Pay Joins China’s Trillion Dollar Mobile Wallet Market
Thursday, March 31, 2016
With Apple already expecting China to be its biggest mobile payment market, it’s no surprise that its biggest direct competitor, Samsung, also wants a slice of this piping hot pie. After a one-month public beta, today the Korean giant is officially launching its Samsung Pay service in China in partnership with UnionPay — inevitably the same bankcard company thathelped launch Apple Pay locally. In other words, only UnionPay credit and debit cards — up to 10 of them per device — can be associated with local Samsung phones for the time being.
The first wave of participating institutions include China’s largest bank, ICBC, along with China Construction Bank, China Merchants Bank and several more; other major ones such as Bank Of China and Bank Of Communications will follow later. As for devices, only the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 Edge, Galaxy S6 Edge+ and Galaxy Note5 are supported for now, but Samsung hinted at the possibility of adding more phones with fingerprint readers later, which will hopefully include the Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, A5, A7 and A9 that were also tested in the public beta. It goes without saying that rooted devices won’t support Samsung Pay.
Source: Engadget (link opens in a new window)
- Categories
- Technology
- Tags
- fintech
